I cut watermelon with a 4 inch knife I bought second hand. It doesn't glide through the rind like it should-- in fact, it barely cuts through the soft innards. The blade lost its first edge long before it touched my hands in a life I'll never know, and now it belongs to me, practically useless in even more useless hands.
When I was young, young enough to spend my summers doing nothing and not worrying, my mother used to butcher melons. The pretty green rind would be cut into long, practiced strips as she trimmed away the deep red fruit, leaving behind only a silver of watery, barely there pink. It was practiced, a skill even my father the chef envied. Beautiful, even cuts, with only the bare minimum fruit left behind.
My brother and I would sit on the back porch with a grocery bag full of the leftovers. Sometimes we'd listen to the neighbors argue, sometimes listen to the new girl get dropped off at the half way house, sometimes listen to nothing at all, while we suckled the pink out of the white rind until no flavor was left. We'd go through the bag like animals, searching for the hidden bits of sweetness my mother left behind with sticky fingers.
Then, when the pieces were as white as bone, gnawed down to the green, my mom would give us each a hunk of fruit. Actual, sugar-filled, red as rubies, drip down your chin juicy pieces of fruit with a bit of salt dashed on top.
'It's sweeter when you compare it to the scraps, right?' she'd say. "It tastes better when you have a frame of reference."
My knife isn't sharp enough to leave only a silver of pink; it leaves me with only white, and yet a gnaw on this anyway, if only for the memory of flavor.
Sometimes, I wonder if I'm in my rind phase of life. If this is the time period I have to taste for the rest of my life to taste even sweeter.
